Pop music is too loud these days

Barbadian singer Rihanna performs on stage during a concert on October 19, 2013 in Abu Dhabi. (Karim Sahib/AFP/Getty Images)

Modern music is just noise. You can't hear the words properly. Those electronic things aren't proper instruments. Why is it all so loud? You can't dance to this, not like in my day.

This is your father speaking. It's everyone's father speaking. It may even be you speaking. Inter-generational arguments about the merits of popular music will never cease, but how has music really changed over time? Maybe data, rather than dads' disapproval, holds the key to answering that question.

The Echo Nest is one of the more interesting music technology companies in 2013, with a database of more than one trillion data points about 35m songs from 2.6m artists, which it provides to digital music services from companies including Spotify, Deezer, Rdio, Nokia and Vevo, along with tools to make sense of all this metadata.

However, it also publishes its own research, including a series of blog posts this year about studies by its “data alchemist” Glenn McDonald, running tests on the 5,000 hotttest [sic] tracks from 1950 to 2013 to see how specific attributes – including energy, loudness, organicness, acousticness and mechanism – have changed over that time.

The results make for interesting, sometimes surprising reading (caveat: it's popular songs, not a snapshot of all music). Here are some of the highlights, with each section title a link to the full blog post outlining the results.

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Is music happier or sadder?

Start with an examination of “valence” – a psychological term referring to happiness. Can you really measure a song's happiness with an algorithm? The Echo Nest reckons you can, and in less than three seconds (“We have a music expert classify some sample songs by valence, then use machine-learning to extend those rules to all of the rest of the music in the world, fine tuning as we go”).

How does this valence attribute change over time from 1950 to the present day? “Apparently, regardless of decade, prominent musical styles, or any other factor, we pretty much always like our pop music, on average, right in the middle of happy and sad,” explains The Echo Nest's blog post.

“Yes, we see a few spikes — the '50s oscillated between happy or sad music being preferred — and we've seen a general trend towards lower emotional valence since right around the emergence of punk rock, which makes a certain kind of sense. However, overall, the emotional effect of our favorite music has tended right towards the 'happy medium' between happy and sad.”

Is music more or less mechanistic?

The mechanism rating assesses whether a song sticks rigidly to a click track or drum machine, or is more organic and “tempo-wandering”. No big surprises here: the latter has become less evident (remember: in the 5,000 biggest tracks) over the years.

“Popular music's mechanism held pretty steady through the '50s and '60s, increasing slowly but steadily throughout the 70s, shooting way up during the '80s (drum machines?) and a bit more in the '90s (more drum machines?), mostly stabilizing after that, right up until the present day,” explains The Echo Nest's blog post.

“In other words, music has gotten more mechanistic over the past few decades, but it has stopped getting even more mechanistic. Some people say that overly mechanistic music lacks a human feel. Perhaps our popular music has gotten as mechanistic-sounding as it will get.”

Is music more or less acoustic?

Yes yes, there are a fair few banjo-plucking folk artists making it big in 2013, but on the whole, music has got less acoustic over the decades, thanks to the introduction of new technology. The Echo Nest rates songs by how many prominent acoustic sounds they have versus how electronic they are: acoustic guitars and tambourines versus synthesizers and drum machines, for example.

“Popular music started out fairly acoustic in the '50s. After that, its “acousticness” declined steadily, decade after decade, mirroring technology's integration into greater society at large,” explains its blog post.

“You don't have to be Skrillex to appreciate that music has gotten more electronic, of course. And, everybody knows that the '80s saw a big rise in drum machines and synthesizer. We all have an instinctive sense that music has sounded more electronic, and less acoustic, over time. We can trust our ears, this time around.”

Is music more or less organic?

This one seems obvious, and it is: music has become less 'organic' over time: that meaning more rhythmically precise and artificial sounding (not intended as a criticism, by me at least). The Echo Nest's organicness attribute is a combination of mechanism and acousticness.

Music IS getting louder: it's one of those things a lot of people think, even if they don't know the scientific proof. But is there scientific proof? In a word: yes.

“The loudness of the hotttest 5,000 songs each year increased very slowly from the '50s through the '80s, and then more rapidly and steadily, all the way to the present day,” explains The Echo Nest.

“Popular music started getting louder during the heyday of Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, and The Everly Brothers, but only by a little bit. Right around the rise of the compact disc, in the very late '80s, music started getting louder at a faster rate. The trend continues to this day.”

Is music more or less bouncy?

Bounciness? That's a measure of how rhythmic and “sonically spiky” the music is: tech house, reggae and salsa have bounce to spare, while choral music and atmospheric black metal are... less so. And interestingly, we're not in the bounciest age of music.

“In the '70s, popular music grew bouncier once again — but that was its last peak. Music has been getting less bouncy (i.e. smoother) ever since,” explains the blog post.

“Maybe we just like our music with less bounciness, as the years have passed, similarly to the way a bouncing ball bounces less over time. Or, maybe we've been making our music more complex, adding more and more bits (and then compressing our music to make it louder), so that there's just less space in between the notes.”

Is music getting faster or slower?

The world is getting faster, but is music following suit? Interestingly, not as much as you might think.”As everything else speeds up, the tempo (also known as 'beats per minute') of the music we like has remained fairly constant over past few decades,” explains the blog post.

“There was, however, a time when the speed of our favorite music was accelerating. Starting in the '50s, the advent of rock n' roll may have combined with our growing obsession with the automobile and/or other factors to propel the tempo of our favorite music to new heights, leading to highpoints in 1980 and 1983.”

Also worth knowing for a pop quiz (possibly) – the fastest year for music was 1980, with an average of 110 BPM. The slowest was 1960, with a BPM of 101.

Is music getting more or less energetic?

You might think this was the same question as the last one, but no. The Echo Nest's definition of energetic includes loudness, beats, structural changes and the sounds of instruments. And that shows that while music isn't getting much faster, it is getting more energetic.

“Notably, popular music's energy level plateaued slightly during the '80s. Other than that, we've seen a pretty consistent ramp-up in the energy level of our favorite jams,” explains the blog post.

“This 'energy' attribute results in a scaled floating point metric from 0 to 1, where 1 is the most energetic. From this analysis, popular music's energy level started out around .3, and has now climbed to .7 — a big increase, and one that took decades.”

If Cliff Richard's looking tired, now you know why.

Is music getting more or less danceable?

Finally, something to unite the generations: music has always kept around the same level of danceability (yes, a real attribute used by The Echo Nest and its clients to measure how likely songs are to instigate twisting, potato-mashing, vogueing, daggering or all four).

“From the days when Elvis ruled the airwaves through the hippy '60s, the smooth rock and disco '70s, the new wave, synthpop, and hip-hop of the '80s, the grunge-y '90s, the boy bands that followed, all the way to the hip-hop-tinged pop that's popular today, our favourite music has remained approximately as easy to dance to,” explains The Echo Nest.

“In other words, from the time when your parents or grandparents demurely cut a rug to Elvis, all the way to Miley Cyrus's controversial twerking at the VMA Awards last week, we've preferred our music to have just over average danceability.”

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